Tire pressure monitoring devices of this type are used in particular for measuring the tire pressure of motor vehicle wheels. A wrong tire pressure causes an unnecessarily high amount of tire wear and higher fuel consumption. Further, the tire can become damaged or suddenly destroyed due to an increased flexing energy, especially at too low tire pressure, which may lead to serious accidents in traffic.
DE 4205911 A1 discloses a monitoring device for the inflation pressure of tires of vehicle wheels. The realization presented in this application is, however, very sophisticated. One mentioned embodiment includes an associated receiver at the vehicle for each transmitter in the wheel, while another embodiment is based on a combined transmitting/receiving unit in the wheel and one or more receiving devices at the vehicle. The individual wheels are associated with the mounting positions by way of a so-called pairing process performed either manually or automatically. The manual pairing process is very time-consuming and labor-intense and, in the event of faulty handling, can cause a wrong allocation of the individual wheels to the mounting positions. Fail-free allocation of the individual wheels to the mounting positions is possible in the automatic pairing process, however, the technical effort needed is very extensive and, hence, costly.
Further, WO 02/072369 A1 discloses a method of determining the mounting positions (front left wheel, rear right wheel, etc.) of the vehicle wheels. The method mentioned in this publication is based on a measurement of the vehicle wheel temperatures, and allocation of the vehicle wheels to the respective mounting position takes place by way of the evaluation of the vehicle wheel temperatures in dependence on special detecting driving maneuvers. In this arrangement, the wheels exhibiting the highest temperature values are allocated to the driven axle. This allocation is, however, not correct because the temperature increase of the wheels mainly depends on vehicle-specific axle load rather than on the driven axle.